Les eaux troubles d’une ville thermale: l’usage de la Co-Création pour décoloniser le récit officiel de Bath, site du Patrimoine Mondial de l’UNESCO

In the summer of 2020, international events and local responses to them, including the removal in Bristol of the statue of Edward Colston, a17th century slave trader turned philanthropist, created an imperative for a long-delayed public debate about Bath's ties to empire, colonialism and transatlantic slavery. This unprecedented challenge to official narratives represented a turning point and an extraordinary opportunity for museums, artists, academics and civil society to reconfigure the city's "memorial landscape" by incorporating new voices and approaches to the past.
This chapter aims to analyze this period of questioning by relying on two attempts to question the dominant discourses of the city by using the method of Co-Creation to transform the memorial landscape of Bath, a white and bourgeois city reluctant to risk the expensive revenues from tourism that attract the perfect image of the city and its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the city that has long resisted pressure to reveal its links with transatlantic slavery, a first Co-Creation initiative in September 2019 sought to make visible in the public space the erased memory of slavery through participatory walking and the artistic techniques of collage and graffiti. The second intervention, undertaken during the academic years of 2020-21 and 2021-22 and punctuated by the pandemic and confinement, aimed to design a guided tour and a map facilitating self-guided tours, in order to allow residents and visitors of the city to discover its colonial links. The chapter draws on Chantal Mouffe's concepts of agonistic democracy and Horvath and Carpenter's theorization of memory and Horvath and Carpenter's theorization of memory and Co-Céation to assess from an agonistic perspective the changes that have occurred since then in the Bath memorial landscape and the usefulness of Co-Creation as a strategy facilitating the decolonization of the memorial landscape and agonistic encounters.